2621.txt

Tim, Alan, I said I would send a brief reply when I got back. Alan is right to ignore these sorts of letters. I'm afraid I have become less responsive to the public over the years, but this has been as a result of continuous defamatory remarks on a number of blog sites. I have tried in the past discussing via email with a few of these people, but it is just a time wasting exercise. Many of the papers I'd been sending them have been published in JGR and one in Reviews of Geophysics. I recall giving lectures in the past when there would be one person who would disagree with something or all I said in an invited talk. The internet has allowed all these people to find one another unfortunately. Some of the emails are quite spiteful, but as yet not as bad as some of the things that have been said ot written about Ben Santer and Mike Mann. In the UK the head of the Natural Environment Research Council tried engaging with these people a couple of years ago, but gave up as it was just the deniers that responded. If you look at the Nature site, that Olive Heffernan set up, after the piece about a month ago, almost all of the responders were deniers. I've given up trying to engage them. I know I should persevere, but I just don't have the time. Cheers Phil At 13:11 03/09/2009, Alan Robock wrote:

Dear Phil, We're always on holiday here in Jersey! Since the letter was to me, I have decided, with the concurrence of others at AGU, to ignore it and not reply. You, Mike Mann, and Ben Santer should form a club. Alan Alan Robock, Professor II Director, Meteorology Undergraduate Program Associate Director, Center for Environmental Prediction Department of Environmental Sciences Phone: +1-732-932-9800 x6222 Rutgers University Fax: +1-732-932-8644 14 College Farm Road E-mail: robockatXYZxyzsci.rutgers.edu New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8551 USA [1]http://envsci.rutgers.edu/~robock On Thu, 3 Sep 2009, P.JonesatXYZxyz.ac.uk wrote:

Alan,> Dear Tim, On holiday in Jersey. Have found a wifi connection unfortuntely? Will get back to you when back at UEA. Getting fed up with all these skeptics. You've only seen the tip of the iceberg! Cheers Phil

This is part of a coordinated attack by global warming deniers on Phil and other climate scientists. To get a flavor of it, see the recent article in Nature at <[2]http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090812/full/460787a.html>, reproduced below. Since the writer is not a member of AGU, I recommend that we just ignore the letter, so it doesn't waste any more of our time as well as Phil's. If he wants to submit it to EOS, he should use the formal process and not expect us to do it for him. Alan Alan Robock, Professor II Director, Meteorology Undergraduate Program Associate Director, Center for Environmental Prediction Department of Environmental Sciences Phone: +1-732-932-9800 x6222 Rutgers University Fax: +1-732-932-8644 14 College Farm Road E-mail: robockatXYZxyzsci.rutgers.edu New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8551 USA [3]http://envsci.rutgers.edu/~robock ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2009 17:03:46 +0100 From: Rupert Wyndham <rupertwyndhamatXYZxyzglemail.com> To: robockatXYZxyzsci.rutgers.edu, tlgroveatXYZxyz.edu Subject: AGU and Dr. P. Jones Gentlemen Please be advised that the letter attached has today been airmailed to you. Yours truly RCE Wyndham -------------------- Published online 12 August 2009 | Nature 460, 787 (2009) | doi:10.1038/460787a Nature News Climate data spat intensifies Growing demands for access to information swamp scientist. Olive Heffernan A leading UK climatologist is being inundated by freedom-of-information-act requests to make raw climate data publicly available, leading to a renewed row over data access. Since 2002, Steve McIntyre, the editor of Climate Audit, a blog that investigates the statistical methods used in climate science, has repeatedly asked Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, UK, for access to monthly global surface temperature data held by the institute. But in recent weeks, Jones has been swamped by a sudden surge in demands for data. Several organizations worldwide collect and report global average temperature data for each month. Of these, a temperature data set held jointly by CRU and the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre in Exeter, known as HadCRU, extends back the farthest, beginning in 1850. Although these data are made available in a processed format that shows the global trend, access to the raw data is restricted to academics. Between 24 July and 29 July of this year, CRU received 58 freedom-of-information-act requests from McIntyre and people affiliated with Climate Audit, requesting access to the data or information about their use. In the past month, the UK Met Office, which receives a cleaned-up version of the raw data from CRU, has received ten requests of its own. McIntyre, based in Toronto, Ontario, is best known for questioning the validity of the statistical analyses used to reconstruct the past 1,000 years of climate, but has more recently turned his attention to criticizing the quality of global temperature records. Jones concedes that raw climate data have imperfections such as duplication of stations but says that such minor errors would not alter the overall global temperature trend. McIntyre insists that he is not interested in challenging the science of climate change or in nit-picking, but is simply asking that the data be made available. "The only policy I want people to change is their data-access policy," he says. Jones says he can't fulfil the requests because of confidentiality agreements signed in the 1990s with some nations, including Spain, Germany, Bahrain and Norway, that restrict the data to academic use. In some cases, says Jones, the agreements were made verbally, and in others the written records were mislaid during a move. He says he is now working to make the data publicly available online. As Nature went to press, Jones was expected to post a statement on the CRU website to that effect, including any existing confidentiality agreements. Jones says any such data release "needs to be done in a systematic way". "We're trying to make them all available," says Jones. "We're consulting with all the meteorological services about 150 members [of the World Meteorological Organization] and will ask them if they are happy to release the data." A spokesperson for the Met Office confirmed this, saying "we are happy for CRU to take the lead on this, as they are their data". But getting the all-clear from other nations won't be without its challenges, says Jones, who estimates that it could take several months. In addition, some nations may object if they make money by selling their wind, sunshine and precipitation data. The dispute is likely to continue for some time. McIntyre is especially aggrieved that Peter Webster, a hurricane expert at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, was recently provided with data that had been refused to him. Webster says his team was given the station data for a very specific request that will result in a joint publication with Jones. "Reasonable requests should be fulfilled because making data available advances science," says Webster, "but it has to be an authentic request because otherwise you'd be swamped." Indeed, Jones says he has become "markedly less responsive to the public over the past few years as a result of this".